|
|
|
Your District Council’s draft ‘Local Plan’:
Over and out.
Dear Member
For the sake of completeness:
In our newsletter of April 2020, we set out the background to the exchanges taking place at that time between our District Council (SADC) and The Planning Inspectorate.
The first link below was in our April newsletter.
The second link below and the third link bring you right up-to- date.
The content in the third link is short and to the point.
In paragraph 15, The Inspectors say that SADC has not cooperated with other policy making authorities sufficiently well under what is called a ‘Duty to Cooperate’ and the plan must be withdrawn for that failure alone.
1) The Inspectors' 18 page critique dated 14 April is at:
https://www.stalbans.gov.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/ED40%20%20Inspectors%20Post%20Hearings%20Letter%2014.4.20.pdf
2) Clutching at straws to justify their draft plan, SADC replied in early July 2020 at:
https://www.stalbans.gov.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/ED41A%20%20SADC%20response%20to%20Inspectors%27%20Post%20Hearings%20Letter%20_0.pdf
3) Finally, the Inspectors brought the exchanges to a crashing halt on 1 September 2020 at:
https://www.stalbans.gov.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/ED42%20%20Inspector%27s%20response%20to%20SADC%20letter%20ED41A%20.pdf
Since The Inspectors' letter of 1 September, SADC is hoping that Sevenoaks District Council will succeed in the case it has recently taken to the High Court which challenges the way in which The Inspectorate applies the ‘Duty to Cooperate’ in the drafting of local plans.
Whilst it awaits the results of the Sevenoaks case, SADC is to begin work on addressing some of The Inspectors’ criticisms of SADC’s draft plan, one of which was the questionable way in which green belt sites were selected.
SADC will now have to commission a new green belt review in order to select the green belt sites which will be taken out of the green belt and developed. This time around, the selection process must produce a result which is based on up-to-date, detailed, well-researched, factual evidence. What a refreshing change it would be if that happens !
Central government, as you would expect, is well aware that SADC has now failed on three occasions to make progress with drafting a Local Plan and it may well decide to take over the production of a new Local Plan from our local politicians and planners. We shall have to wait and see what happens.
There are two other reasons why the politicians and planners in SADC are on the back foot. They now have to confront the possibility that all 10 district councils in Hertfordshire are going to be abolished and replaced by a unitary authority. And on top of that, there is the Government’s controversial White Paper ‘Planning for the Future’ which, inter alia, proposes zoning land into two or three new planning categories with local plans being assessed against a single statutory ‘sustainable development test’…………..good news for developers who will be delighted if existing planning practices and policies are thrown to the wind.
As always, we should all remember that an independent report (commissioned and subsequently ignored by SADC) on the impact of massive housebuilding in our district concluded that ‘we are already exceeding the capacity of the environment’ to support us.
An ‘inconvenient truth’ for central government and local politicians, if ever there was one.
David Rankin
Chairman
The Harpenden Green Belt Association
www.harpendengreenbelt.org.uk
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|